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Research keywords:
Political Economy; Spatial Politics; Labor Studies; Network Study; China Politics

Dissertation title:
Rethinking the Networks: Flexibility in the Mass Customization of China’s Shoe Production

Dissertation abstract:
My ethnographic research is set in the Pearl River Delta Region, or the PRD Region in China. My research is about shoes. We wear shoes every day, but too often, we don’t think about how they are made, who is behind the assembly line, and what process produces a shoe. We may even buy shoes with a single click on Amazon, Taobao, or another e-retail platform. With a click, we extract social, political, and technological resources from whichever community makes our shoes. The capacity for shoe manufacturing in China is transforming from mass production, in which centralized factories produce thousands of the same type of shoe on an assembly line every day, to what is called mass customization, in which every pair of shoes produced on the assembly line is destined for a specific owner, who has already paid online.

If mass production was systems-oriented, mass customization is data-oriented, and this leads to fragmentation which companies repackage and sell as networked flexibility. The result of this relentless push for flexibility is that labor and space are subjected to various forms of value extraction through digital driven production. Data is learned from data; algorithms are designed to design. Such translation is not segregated in one assembly line, rather, it is a network of knowledge within the system, and it also generates connections beyond its boundary for manufacturing.

Email: [email protected]

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Major field: 
Comparative Politics

Dissertation title: 
Flexible Identities, Resilient People: The Crimean Tatars’ Struggle for Self-Determination (1905-2020)

Research profile: 
Mariia Shynkarenko will receive a PhD in Politics from The New School for Social Research (NSSR) in May 2023. She specializes in comparative politics and political theory. Her academic interests include identities, movements for self-determination, nationalism, authoritarianism, and memory in the Soviet and post-Soviet contexts. In particular, she studies the role of collective identities in the Crimean Tatars’ struggle for self-determination in Crimea. Mariia has taught a variety of courses at The New School and at St. John’s University in Queens. She also held numerous fellowships, including from the University of Toronto, the University of Alberta, and New York University. Her work has appeared both in academic journals, such as Communist and Post-Communist Studies, and in online outlets, such as Public Seminar, Democracy Seminar, NYU Jordan Center Blog, Eurozine, and others. She is currently based in Vienna, where she begins her new position as a Research Associate at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM).

Email: [email protected]